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Undercover Has Arrived

By nickm | Published April 21, 2013

After a little over a year of intensive planning, recording, and mixing, Undercover is done. Tonight we’ll be signing and packing up the last of our Kickstarter rewards. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully express our thanks to our fans, family, and friends that made this album possible. The support and encouragement we received really recharged our batteries and given us the juice to not just finish this album but to look to future projects.

For those of you that missed ut on the Kickstarter action, fear not! At the moment, the album is available on the following sites:

Undercover at CDBaby
Undercover at bandcamp

So, I suppose this brings an end to this chapter of Endless Blue’s history. Next up is the B-sides of Undercover, those tunes we recorded but didn’t quite make the cut on the final album. After that, though, is another all original album. We’re already a few almost fully completed songs in, with a ton of ideas in that primordial ooze stage. We’re really excited to get back to it as there is nothing more fulfilling than finishing one’s own songs.

And it’s about time. Covers are fun, but writing is funer.

For now, though, we’re going to relax and celebrate.

Cheers!

Posted in Music, News, Recording | Tagged cover songs, endless blue, kickstarter, Laura Hillman, new album, new cd, Next Endless Blue Album, Nick Mitchell, scott feldstein, undercover

Home Stretch to Final Mixdowns

By nickm | Published February 15, 2013

So here we are, coming to the end of the process. It’s been a wild year of writing, recording, mixing, and rerecording. Next week we pass along our mixes to Brian Hazard at Resonance Mastering and, from there, the CD pressing service. And from there to your hot little hands. The final track list is:

Jolene – Dolly Parton
Turn the Page – Bob Segar
Bad Things – Jace Everret
Safety Dance – Men Without Hats
The Thrill Is Gone – B. B. King
2wicky – Hooverphonic
Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? – Culture Club
I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones
Tarkus – Battlefield – Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
What Don’t You Do Right – Joe McCoy / Peggy Lee
Magic Man – Heart
Beautiful Accident – You’re Pretty

Now, I know it’s cliche for an artist to say “this is our best album EVAR”, and I’m going to happily fall into that cliche. Undercover has come together in a truly amazing way, with everyone in the band pushing each other to reach farther and up their game. There was never that feeling of “well, that’s good enough” — no, even though it made me want to tear my meager hear out, Laura was rerecording entire songs just a few nights ago, and to great improvement. This will be the best sounding album we’ve released to date.

Posted in Music, News, Recording | Tagged cover songs, endless blue, kickstarter, new album, new cd, Next Endless Blue Album, resonance mastering, studio, undercover

Red Light Off, Now to the Mix

By nickm | Published January 10, 2013

As of the holidays we have completed principal recording for Undercover. Recording a whopping 18 songs in just over a year is pretty decent for a bunch of people with full-time jobs. This does fall short of the 20 song goal I had set, though. Two tracks were sketched out but never got fully launched and I just ran out of steam and drive to replace them. You reach a point, too, where you can slog through two more tracks or you can start shaping and tweaking what you’ve got. We all collectively decided its time to do the latter. So apart from pick-ups and tweaks, Laura and Scott are done.

Which leaves me as designated driver at our studio get togethers, as my work has just started.

But mixing? I love it. It’s probably my favorite part of the process. I liken it to sculpting more than any other activity. You take a stone, rough it out, then slowly use your tools to shape it into art. Same with a mix. It has somewhat of an iterative process to it — you tweak the mixes, burn them to a disc, throw it in your car for a few days. Between driving to work and the house to let the dogs out you get plenty of “Oh, that doesn’t sound right” moments. Take this, tweak the mixes, lather, rinse, repeat.

One step I will be glad to be handing off for Undercover is mastering… Yes, thanks to all the kickstarter love, I will not be in charge of the mystical incantations and pixie dust portion of our album. No, that I will be leaving that to Brian Hazard of Resonance Mastering. We’ve bumped into Brian’s work all throughout our existence as a band and are excited to finally have the cash to splurge on his mystic powers of squishing sound. Expect Undercover to sound really effing good.

With that I’ll bring this to a close. The Heat soundtrack just popped up on my iPod, so I’m going to go cry and wish it was summer. Then I’ll go mix some tracks.

Posted in Music, News, Recording | Tagged brian hazard, cover songs, endless blue, Laura Hillman, mixing, new album, Next Endless Blue Album, recording, resonance mastering, studio, undercover

And The Grind Goes On

By nickm | Published November 16, 2012

Just wanted to drop a note that, yes, we are in fact still alive. Hooray!

The reality is that we are deep in the grind for Undercover. 14 songs with full recording, three need vocals or bass or both, two that are in the midst of production, and one left to be picked. This is easily the most ambition project any of us have worked on — pretty crazy stuff. And most crazy is that I actually think we’ll hit our release date of April 2013! On the mixing side of things, I find myself working much more efficiently, tossing out recipe production tricks and just going with what sounds good. I have a nice clear vision of what I expect each track to sound like, which is a bit different than what happens with our original work… Covers are so much easier since you already have a starting structure to work off of.

Given all of that, I will be excited to get back to Endless Blue music. Working with Scott on Undercover has helped to shape a bit of a derivative sound for us, a bit more of the organic “real band” vibe. At our last recording session we all recorded live in a single take rather than tracking separately, and it was pretty cool. Not sure if I heard any magic just yet, but I look forward to trying it again soon, and especially on our new music. I feel there is something to getting that more “bandy” vibe in our music that takes other artists like Zero 7 and Air out of the electronica genre and puts them firmly somewhere else. I’ve always felt trip-hop, at its soul, was always more organic than its cousins, and it’s really exciting to take it there more fundamentally in Endless Blue.

In other news, I’ve been dealing with ongoing shenanigans on YouTube, and the general feeling I’m getting is… Icky… We’re going to be trying out vimeo as an alternative hosting site. Granted visibility will not be as high there and we will not be cancelling at YouTube any time soon, but all the same, I feel vimeo is a bit more artist friendly.

All for now, cheers!

Posted in Musing, News, Recording | Tagged cover songs, endless blue, kickstarter, new cd, Next Endless Blue Album, recording, studio, undercover

Vinyl, Undercover, and Fistfights with Miramax

By nickm | Published June 22, 2012

Chilling out this evening, having a beer and partaking in my latest obsession: crappy thrift store vinyl. There’s something about the tactile immediacy of vinyl that is very appealing. There was also a glut of vinyl put out in the 60′s that is not only interesting but really lost to the world — I mean, how many of the approximately 10 gazillion 101 Strings albums (a thrift store staple) were reissued on CD or digital format? Not to say this stuff is particularly very good… But it’s a snapshot and has a “sound” I’ve become very attached to.

Anyway, first an update on “Undercover”:

Arranging and recording continues a a pretty steady clip. There have been a few hiccups in the early summer (busy travel schedules, moving our studio, and Diablo III to name a few), but we’re still easily on track to finish principle recording by the end of the year, with mixing and mastering to take place in the spring of 2013. We’re in the thick of our big donor’s songs, some of which have been… Challenging… But that’s been the whole point of this album, to put us outside our comfort zone. We’ll post our progress on SoundCloud this weekend to our donors that have access.

In between working on Undercover tracks we’ve been working on original material for our next album. It’s all just preliminary stuff at the moment, with a few exceptions. Hard to describe where our sound is headed, but it’s a little different — maybe a little more classic trip-hop with plenty of vinyl injected in (see first paragraph). It’s still a bit amorphous, but it’s definitely headed in a direction. Who knows which one, though…

On the live front, we’re all itching to play some shows but have fallen out of the game enough that its proving a little tough to get the ‘ole motor running again. A planning meeting is in order, maybe with a some minutes and synergy to make it official. Wisconsin, here we come, ever so slowly.

Finally, here’s a new video, this time for “Goodbye”. Miramax seems a bit miffed at our use of “Kill Bill”, but hey, whatever. Come at me bro.

Posted in Music, News, Recording |

New Endless Blue CD Project: Undercover

By nickm | Published February 29, 2012

Undercover is a concept we’ve had for some time now — a studio CD of all covers, trip-hop-ized and reinterpreted in our style. We’ve been considering it for years, fermenting and sloshing around in our little brains but never quite happening. The logistics of gathering all the suggested songs and paying the royalties to release the covers has always been just a bit out of our reach.

And then Kickstarter came along, giving us this amazing platform to croudfund and manage such a project (and possibly get us in front of new supporters and fans to boot). About a year ago, before we had even finalized the track list on Unfriend, we knew that our next project would be Undercover via Kickstarter. After many hours of hard work and preparation, the time has come.

Help us fund Undercover and you get to help us pick the songs you want us to record. Help us at a premium level, and you get to pick a song directly. You pick, we record. What could be more fun?

Visit the Kickstarter project for Undercover here!

Posted in Music, News, Recording | Tagged cover songs, endless blue, kickstarter, new cd, recording, studio, undercover

First Remix Pack: Low

By nickm | Published February 12, 2012

Digging through the archives and dusting off boxes really gets the gears going. On a seemingly impossible mission to mine remixes from archive.org, it hit me: most of these remixes are over five years old. Isn’t it time to get some new ones? Providing remix materials seems even more relevant in this day of mashups and social sites like SoundCloud.

I spent an hour or two this weekend working up a remix pack for our rather popular song Low off the Smoke Through It album. It’s a combination of loops and full audio tracks in the OGG format (before you groan, there are 6 bazillion programs that can convert to .wav or wahtever). Provided is a REAPER and EDL project that will show the fully tracked out song. Lead vocals are dry, and most volume and panning automation has been stripped. I tried to get the “best” sound for each loop/track, so this isn’t a really spectacular mixdown. FYI.

Anyway, have at it. This remix pack is released Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (click the CC image on this post for details). You can remix away and even sell it on your CD or on bandcamp. You only have to give us credit and share your resulting track as well. Hopefully you’ll share it with us on facebook, twitter, or SoundCloud. We would love to reshare it to all our fans as well!

Download the Low Remix Pack (26.36MB .zip file)

Posted in Music, News, Recording, Remix | Tagged creative commons, endless blue, Low, Low remix pack, remix

Meet Scott. He Plays Bass

By nickm | Published January 8, 2012

So this is Scott Feldstein, the newest member of our rag-tag crew of trip-hoppers. He’s been playing bass since he was 13 and plays in a way that evokes large reptiles smashing asian cities (I mean, seriously, you should hear Goodbye live now). Yet Scott is definitely on the same page as Endless Blue and will use his mighty talent only for good and for our wicked grooves. You’ll be seeing/hearing a lot of him as he takes over bass duties from Nick in 2012 and beyond.

Incidentally, this time we really really made sure he wanted to be in our band before we announced his membership.

Show him some love on twitter (@scottfeldstein) or on his blog at scottfeldstein.net. Welcome, Scott!

Posted in News |

Happy New Year and EB Rarities and Remixes

By nickm | Published January 1, 2012

So, first off, happy new year! We hope your reveries were wild but you hangovers are mild. But likely one does not follow the other, so YMMV.

2011 was a good year for Endless Blue. I feel like we’ve picked up a little momentum and that we’re getting back into the groove of writing and recording. We also started beating the internet promotion a bit more, and it’s nice to see a lot of fresh faces and names listening to our music from around the world. Here’s to 2012 being more of the same.

Along those lines, we’re going to start adding some of our B-Side, remixes, and rarities to SoundCloud. Many of these have been around for a while, but they never had a real home. The first is a Drum & Bass remix of Broken Waters:

The other is a remix we did of Nine Inch Nail’s track Only off the album With Teeth:

Posted in Music, Musing, News |

Unfriend on all the things!

By nickm | Published December 3, 2011

Our lovely EP Unfriend has worked its way through the sausage factory and into all the various music things on the intertubes (iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, Amazon MP3 US, Amazon MP3 UK, Amazon MP3 DE, BandCamp), including the new Google Music service. Oh, and a bunch of filesharing sites if you’re so inclined (and want us to starve, you filthy freeloaders. Okay, maybe we’ll just have to buy less beer). So there is no excuse for you to not be listening to EB right this instant.

Posted in Music, News |

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